Elizabeth Buchan: The Good Wife aka The Good Wife Strikes Back

Between mouthfuls, she asked, ‘Is Sacha OK?’

‘He kept watch. He’s probably asleep.’

Meg gave a wry smile. ‘Sacha says he writes his songs late at night. He says his mind is more receptive and fertile then.’

‘Does he?’ I knew what Sacha meant. When I was feeding Chloë as a baby, those small hours of the night provided strange, heightened interludes where, the baby at my breast, I was free from busyness, and at liberty to try and grope my way towards clarity and knowledge.

‘Why do I do it to him, Fanny?’

It was not the first time Meg had asked the question: nor, if both of us were honest, was it likely to be the last. I followed the uneven progress of the cup to her lips. ‘Would you like more help? We can organize it.’

She cut me off. ‘Nope. Done it. It’s up to me now. Battered, unreliable old me.’

‘Please don’t, Meg.’

‘Don’t worry,’ she said quickly. ‘It won’t happen again.’

I sat down at the end of the bed. ‘What about Sacha and Will?’

She grimaced.

‘Shouldn’t be drinking tea on an empty stomach. It doesn’t like it.’ I cut the toast into squares and handed her one.

Meg edged the cup on to the bedside table. ‘So many people to fuss and worry over, Fanny. It must positively warm your heart.’

‘Stop it.’

‘Sorry, didn’t mean it.’

At times like this, Meg took pleasure in driving me, or whoever was coping with her, to the edge, but we both knew the boundaries of our co-existence. Meg wanted love and a place in the family. Like Will with his passion to change the world for the better, I wanted to help, and somehow, muddling along, we had managed to keep a balance.

She looked up and said softly, ‘I’m a good cause, the kind you like. The best, because I’m unredeemable. So none of you can blame yourselves when the worst happens.’ She dropped the half-eaten toast back on the plate. ‘Go away, Fanny. Go and be busy and keep everything in order.’

I removed the tray from her lap. ‘Rob rang this morning.’

‘So? I talked to him yesterday.’

‘He forgot to remind you that it’s Sacha’s birthday at the weekend. He wanted to know what you were doing about it.’

Meg buried her face in her hands. ‘What have I done?’

I bent down, picked up her discarded jumper and trousers and placed them on the chair. ‘I’m busy today. I’ll see you later.’

‘It’s all Rob’s fault,’ she muttered. ‘If he’d stayed married to me, I might have got through.’

At my wits’ end, I whirled round. ‘Meg, you drove him to it. He fell in love with Tania out of the exhaustion.’

‘I’m sick,’ she said flatly. ‘He should have tried harder. You shouldn’t give up on sick people.’

‘Have I ever given up on you?’ I asked.

‘You’ve wanted to. Be honest.’

We stared at each other. Meg was the first to drop her gaze but only because she knew she was the victor. She knew she had made it impossible for me to walk out of the room.

I drew up a chair, manipulated the banana on to the spoon and handed it to her. ‘Eat.’

A smile hovered at the corner of her mouth, but her eyes darted towards the whisky bottle in the wastepaper basket, before she parted her lips.

I used to dream of a big, generous, blowsy household where children rustled and muttered in the bedrooms – two, three, even four. And every night I would go round and count them. ‘This is Millie’, I would say, smoothing fair tangles away from her face. ‘This is Arthur’, removing the thumb from his mouth. And this … this one is Jamie, the terror.’

But it had not happened that way. After Chloë there were no more babies. My body pulled and strained to obey my longings, but it could not do what I asked of it. They haunt me, my non-children. Those warm, sleeping, rosy bodies, the children-who-never-were. Sometimes, I listen out for them playing under the eaves of my ugly house.

‘I don’t mind,’ Will said to me once. ‘We have Chloë, that’s enough. We look after her. I look after you. You look after me, Fanny. Be content,please’

‘Don’t you mind at all?’ I asked.

He touched my cheek. ‘I mind for you. I mind anything that hurts you.’

Yet my household was full and we had been happy. First Chloë was born, and I was catapulted into the terror and mystery and exultation of a love that would never die. Then Meg came to live with us; Sacha too, after his sixteenth birthday. The au pairs came and went; the party workers slipped in and out; each leaving a ghostly imprint on the atmosphere, their rustles and murmurs dissolving into the general murmur of our lives.

‘Is anything wrong Francesca?’

My father was the only person who ever called me by my full name, and very little of what I felt or did escaped his scrutiny which was sometimes critical, but always loving.

‘Not really.’ I looked up from our scratch lunch of mushroom soup and cheese in the dining room at Ember House. It was only five miles from our house and I wrestled him into the diary at least once a week.

The clock ticked reassuringly on the walnut sideboard and the blurred reflection of the blue and white fruit bowl beside it had the depth and stillness of a painting.

The electric light emphasized the lines on my father’s face. New lines? And his tweed jacket seemed looser than I remembered. He had always been bony: all his energy had gone into running his wine business – and into me, his only child. I don’t know what he thought about my situation, for there were some things about which he was guarded, but his pride in Battista Fine Wines was immense. It was a highly respected, idiosyncratic operation, catering to a growing number of wine lovers who were prepared to trust my father to select their wines, rather than the supermarket.

I speared a gobbet of dolcelatte on my knife. ‘Once Chloë’s exams are over, things will settle down.’

How did one admit to the feeling that a crossroads had been reached? How did a girl – no , a woman come to terms with the fact that her daughter was about to leave home? How could I argue that the choices I had once made no longer offered me surety and comfort, or gave me validation. I forced a smile. ‘I’m fine, Dad. Just a cloud passing over the sun. And talking of which, I think you could do with some vitamins.’

‘Stop fussing,’ he said happily.

A hem of the curtains that Caro, my father’s ex-mistress, had chosen so long ago required repair and I added that, along with the vitamins, to my mental list of Things To Do.

My father tapped a finger against a bottle of Le Pin Pomerol – the gentlest, richest of clarets. ‘Think about this instead. Raoul put me on to it.’

Raoul Villeneuve was the son of one of my father’s closest business contacts – not that ‘business’ adequately described the perfection with which trade and a lifestyle had been blended. Raoul was a friend. He had also been my first lover – but I don’t think about that.

Yes, I do. Sometimes. I strain to catch the exact sensation, recapture the sear of my startled reaction. Not because I want Raoul, but because I had not worked out what went wrong exactly.

‘How is Raoul? I haven’t spoken to him lately’

‘Expanding the business. Busy with the family. Enjoying his reputation.’

‘Ah,’ I said. In material terms, Raoul had done better than Will, but he had had an advantage: his family’s wine empire had been waiting for him to assume command. It had been different for Will, whose background had been bare of luxuries.

‘What does “Ah” mean?’ asked my father.

‘Nothing.’